Pages

Saturday, 16 June 2012

Creme Fraiche Bundt Cake

As I looked in my fridge the other day I realised that the pot of creme fraiche earmarked for mushroom stroganoff and rapidly approaching its use-by date wasn't destined to end up on my dinner plate paired with mushrooms, rice and all manner of other delicious things. No mushrooms for a start.... Time for a rethink, and a visit to BBC Good Food for some quick inspiration.

I didn't find inspiration to use my pot of creme fraiche as it was, but did find a recipe for a sour cream bundt cake. Well, by my logic, both soured cream and creme fraiche are dairy products with an acidic tang and since I had half fat creme fraiche it was a similar fat content to the stipulated soured cream too. The substitution seemed reasonable to me.

I followed the recipe pretty much as given and used my bundt tin that when full to the brim holds 2 litres of water. For the method I creamed butter and sugar as specified but then just added the rest of the ingredients in one go - seems to work fine! My ingredient modifications were to use self raising flour as I wanted more of a rise than I thought plain flour plus the specified tsp of baking powder would give, and I also used a different glaze. The glaze specified in the recipe is a butter one and it just seems to look a little odd from the photo - sort of grainy and split and not very attractive. Instead I decided to use a plain glace icing - 125g (or so, it's always a little vague when making glace icing) plus a little splash of vanilla extract (this gave a rather attractive golden hue to the icing) and some hot water. Judicious addition of the water will give you a glaze that is thin enough to spoon onto the cake, but thick enough to run down the sides attractively.

A very tasty cake - the crumb is quite close and dense in a good way. It was a richly buttery and moist cake, perfect for a slice with a cup of something hot in the middle of the afternoon. The vanilla flavour of the cake was good, but adding vanilla to the icing too really helped with the flavour - the sweetness of the icing was obvious, but the subtle hint of vanilla worked really well.

As this has vanilla in both cake and icing I am submitting it to Alphabakes this month, where the letter is 'V'. Vanilla isn't the most original submission admittedly, but I don't often use vanilla in glace icing - I will be doing in the future though as it worked really well. Alphabakes is hosted this month by Ros at The More than Occasional Baker and cohosted by Caroline of Caroline Makes.

11 comments:

I agree with foodycat - it's a really beautiful cake! Love the icing dripping down the side - yum! There's nothing wrong with Vanilla :) thanks for entering this to alphabakes - a lovely addition to the 'v' treats! Great use of your creme fraiche too :)